Guest Lecture: Communication in Consulting and Personal Branding

Hi folks !

Today, we had a guest lecture by Mr Nikhil. He spoke on the finer aspects of Business Communication and how he had used it effectively in Consulting and Personal Brand Building. It was a very informative lecture on the practical aspects of communications. He introduced us to the exciting world of consulting and what people do there.

The lecture started with an introduction of Mr Nikhil Kulkarni. He used to work at KPMG before quitting and starting his own travel website company. 

This website is available at tripdarwin.com and focuses on the niche segment of holiday planning. It has recently been opened to the general public, before that it was catering only to the B2B clients. The website offers the integrated experience of planning a holiday, generating the itinerary and makes booking everything an easy experience.

Business Communication in Consulting

Then we moved on to discuss how to effectively communicate our ideas to our superiors, our teams and to our clients. He told us that 80% of the consultant’s work is based on communication. Research and Relationship account for only 5% and 15% of the whole job description.

He explained how the business proposals are presented using Power Points and Word document. The reports are also done in that medium. But for executive briefing, presentations are more apt. For work papers, Excel sheets or Word are the right tools. So these Microsoft Office programs are our best friends for effective communication.

The Pyramid Principle

Next he spoke on the pyramid strategy and how to use it to design the content. We should structure our communication in the form of an Introduction -> Contents -> Conclusion. We should be mindful of what is the objective of the work, who is the intended audience, have we covered the problem exhaustively and have we provided the solutions to all the problems ?

MECE

He introduced the jargon MECE: Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. It signifies that all the points we are using should be relevant and should not repeat themselves. This increases the impact of the report. Our points together should exhaustively cover the whole content. If we follow this approach in writing a report, we shall have a higher impact on the audience.

For effective communication, he mentioned that we should start with a key message. Multiple supporting arguments should be provided for our case. These arguments should be individually supported by Ideas, Data, Facts and Logic. Every point should be MECE and unique. At the end, we should use a strong summarizing statement. This approach will help us communicate our idea better to the audience.

Impact in our works

He recommended that we read the book: “How to write Reports and Proposals” by Patrick Forsyth to improve our communication styles. He mentioned multiple ideas using which we can stand out in a crowd. Like we should start our presentations with a statistics or an image. It immediately captures the attention of the audience. 

An image speaks louder than a 1000 words. Our slides should be focussed more on an image rather than having lots of text. Text usually bores the audience.

Personal Brand

Then he talked why it is important to have a personal brand and how to build it. Our personal brands means who we are to the world. It is largely influenced by the type of contents we post on the digital platforms. We should keep updating our image through variety of ways to increase our visibility.

The tools available to us these days are the blogs, Youtube channels, Twitter and Instagram posts. We should properly curate the contents we post on these sites. We need not be celebrities to become famous. The content we post should be of high quality, and people will automatically start following us.

At the end, he showed us examples of how people had build their brands around their digital personas. He also gave his own example of starting a blog around 15 years ago. 

This was a very interesting lecture that had very useful takeaways. I hope to use the content that I have gained in improving my communication style. 

Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it. Please mention it in the comments below !!